Page 24 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Chapter 1

Introduction

Woodrow W. Clark, II a
Clark Strategic Partners, Beverly Hills, CA, United States

Chapter Outline
References 8 Further Reading 9

An earlier book on sustainable communities (Clark, 2009a) was a series of a
dozen sustainable case studies that have actually been implemented. They
ranged from public schools and community colleges in the nonprofit world to
city governments to corporations and business around the world. The idea was
to give people cases that are real and models for them to understand the
breadth and depth of sustainability as both a concept and mechanism for
action.
Sustainable development thus has become an acceptable policy initiative
and programmatic implementation strategy. However, the “devil is still in the
details” as to what sustainable development means. On the one hand, there are
businesses and governments that see sustainable development as being a
strategy for building more homes, office buildings, and large communities. In
order to acknowledge that communities were sustainable, groups formed to
provide scores and credit points. The most popular one in the United States is
the US Green Building Council (USGBC) that developed a scoring mechanism
called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design whose basic score
starts with being “accredited” to its highest as being “platinum.”
Without going into details (see that book The Next Economics, Springer
Press, 2009), the USGBC has become a world leader in establishing sustain-
able buildings. There are now efforts and pilot programs to do the same for
communities and even cities. A number of other organizations in the last
decade have done something similar in the United States, including the
Climate Action Registry, originally founded to be California centric but now
both national and global. Because of the energy crisis that hit California at the

a. Woodrow W. Clark II, Ph.D. is a Qualitative Economist who is Managing Director of Clark
Strategic Partners at www.clarkstrategicpartners.net.

Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-813964-6.00001-X
Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1